Cricket questions at MMA presser — exactly what is wrong with our media

KARACHI: Pakistan is cricket, cricket is Pakistan. We get it; this is a national fact.

Yet, there has to be a limit to how much of a bat and ball this country can take.

If this obsession knows no bounds, then there must be, at the very least, a time and place for cricket aficionados to shove their diehard fandom into others' faces.

The press conference called on Friday (January 20, 2017) at Lahore Press Club for the benefit of an upcoming Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) event was certainly not a place to talk cricket. Yet, queries regarding Azhar Ali's captaincy or the cricket team's fitness were made.

In fact, almost all the questions posed to Inzamamul Haq and Mushtaq Ahmad, who are of the cricket fame but were there to promote the said MMA event, were cricket-oriented.

The two sports legends as well as Fighting Alliance promoter Zubair Asghar spent the entire media session either deflecting away irrelevant cricket questions or relenting.

This was after it made abundantly clear to the reporters that the presence of Inzamam and Mushtaq is to help support the budding sport of MMA.

The practice of young sports/leagues borrowing from the popularity of already established stars from other sports is a common practice all over the world; the Indian Premier League and the UFC are just two of the many wildly successful examples.

[/fbvideo]

Hence, Fighting Alliance's idea was a step in the right direction until it became a misstep, thanks to the media personnel in attendance who neither knew anything about MMA nor seemed receptive to expand their horizons.

Time and again they were reminded that the presser is about MMA and not cricket, but the requests fell to deaf ears.

What could have been the mainstream launching pad for the promising sport of MMA reaped nothing but chaos.

As expected, the sad gathering did make the headlines on TV news channels, but they all had a cricket spin to it.

Our sporting culture wasn't rich to begin with, and it has reached a new level of bland in the last four-five years. Don't hold your breath for the next batch of Aisamul Haqs and Jahangir Khans to come through because our neophobia today is just way too strong, way too deadly.

And until we make even a little bit of room in our hearts and our media, there will be plenty of occasions when the gentlemen's game will do things unworthy of its name and upstage others.